Archive for July 21st, 2009

Back in The Netherlands, at the airport waiting for my flight home…a good time to recap Pohoda 2009.
The roadtrip started on Thursday and went pretty smooth, hardly any traffic-jams although the roadwork in Germany caused us to loose some time. We left early in the morning since this years festival started already on Thursday night with a great show of Basement Jaxx, followed by some magnificent concerts on Friday (The Airborne Toxic Event, Razorlight, The Ting Tings, Pendulum and the dutch live sensation Kraak & Smaak!). The weather was excellent and the atmosphere relaxed and terrific as usual, I love this festival!
We knew that there were some thunderstorms predicted for Saturday afternoon, which would spoil a bit of the fun, but remembering The Prodigy performance at Pohoda some years ago, when the tropical thunderstorm became a magical part of the show, we didn’t think things would be that bad. When the clouds came in we were considering to go to the big dance tent to shelter, but considering the long night ahead we decided to relax a bit and wait for the storm to pass in our own tent. It actually became a small ‘tent party’ with some of our Slovak neighbors, we had a lot of fun…and yes, vodka and some funky wigs helped! 😉
The real cold shower came after storm past, when someone told us that the big dance tent collapsed, killing a 29 year old guy and hospitalizing over 40 people!! (at first I was told the victim was a 15y old boy, later a 25y guy, but various websites report now it was a 29y old guy)

We walked over what used to be a place of fun, excitement and good times and turned into a small warzone…words cannot describe what we saw, check out the Youtube movies below, it was AWEFUL!

Obviously the festival was cancelled and 35,000 people were told to leave right away (mission impossible btw.; cars were queing up and people had to wait 4-6 hours to get of the terrain!). Back in Bratislava we went out to grab some beers, but the Pohoda feeling was long gone.

People were putting candles on the big square in Bratislava the next day, needless to say that the forces of nature caused this festival to end in a terrible way…

ck in The Netherlands, at the airport waiting for my flight home…a good time to recap Pohoda 2009.
The roadtrip on Thursday went pretty smooth, hardly any traffic-jams although the roadwork in Germany caused some time. We left early since the festival started already on Thursday night this year with a great show of Basement Jaxx, followed by some magnificent concerts on Friday (Pendulum, Razorlight and the dutch live sensation Kraak & Smaak!). The weather was excellent and the atmosphere relaxed and terrific as usual, I love this festival!
We knew that there were some thunderstorms predicted for Saturday afternoon, which would spoil a bit of the fun, but remembering The Prodigy performance at Pohoda some years ago, when the tropical thunderstorm became a magical part of the show, we didn’t think things would be that bad. When the clouds came in we were considering to go to the big dance tent to shelter, but considering the long night ahead we decided to relax a bit and wait for the storm to pass in our own tent. It actually became a small ‘tent party’ with some of our Slovak neighbors (vodka and some funky wigs made it standup comedy 😉 ).

The real cold shower came after storm past, twhen someone told us that the big dance tent collapsed, killing a 25 year old boy and hospitalizing over 40 people!! We walked over the terrain, which turned into a small warzone…words cannot describe, so check out the Youtube movie below, AWEFUL!